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Reconsidering the way I explain programming
“Do you know a recipe for a recursive salad?” – I asked. “It consists of tomatoes, olives and a recursive salad”.
My joke falls flat. Michael’s eyes confused and waiting for the explanation. I regroup and try a different strategy – sketching:
One of my failed attempts at explaining recursion
I’ve explained a lot of programming concepts to different people. From high school students who are just getting started, to experienced engineers who are quickly diving into a new programming language.
I used to take a lot of pride in the clever explanations I used to come up with. “Your UI is just a function of state”, “the closure hugs your variables in scope”, “Prolog function arguments can be in or out”. I also loved the visuals, formatting code and showing clever animations.
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Orbit
Orbit is an experimental platform for publishing and engaging with small tasks repeatedly over time. In the short term, it s focused on supporting the mnemonic medium , a way of augmenting texts so that readers can easily remember all the key details. For an example, see Quantum Country, a textbook on quantum computation. More abstractly, Orbit aspires to offer a more general form of spaced repetition systems like Anki, as part of a connected cloud service. Learn more on the home page.
Orbit is a (nascent) ecosystem. At its core are decentralized data structures defining tasks, review actions, and scheduling algorithms. Tasks can be ingested from around the web, via APIs or embedded iframes, or through various services running on your local computer. You can complete scheduled tasks in desktop, mobile, and web applications. A backend service syncs user data and orchestrates notifications.